Nalini Ghuman, an up-and-coming musicologist and expert on the British
composer Edward Elgar, was stopped at the San Francisco airport in
August last year and, without explanation, told that she was no longer
allowed to enter the United States.

Her case has become a cause célèbre among musicologists and the
subject of a protest campaign by the American Musicological Society and
by academic leaders like Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College
at Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., where Ms. Ghuman was to have participated
last month in the Bard Music Festival, showcasing Elgar’s music.

But
the door has remained closed to Ms. Ghuman, an assistant professor at
Mills College in Oakland, Calif., who is British and who had lived,
studied and worked in this country for 10 years before her abrupt
exclusion.

The mystery of her case shows how difficult, if not
impossible, it is to defend against such a decision once the secretive
government process has been set in motion.

After a year of
letters and inquiries, Ms. Ghuman and her Mills College lawyer have
been unable to find out why her residency visa was suddenly revoked, or
whether she was on some security watch list. Nor does she know whether
her application for a new visa, pending since last October, is being
stymied by the shadow of the same unspecified problem or mistake.

In
a tearful telephone interview from her parents' home in western Wales,
Ms. Ghuman, 34, an Oxford graduate who earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, said she felt like a character in Kafka.

"I don't know why it’s happened, what I'm accused of," she said. "There's no opportunity to defend myself. One is just completely
powerless."

Kelly Klundt, a spokeswoman for Customs and Border Protection in the Department of Homeland Security,
said officers at San Francisco International Airport had no choice but
to bar Ms. Ghuman because the State Department, at its discretion, had
revoked her visa. The State Department would not discuss the case,
citing the confidentiality of individual visa records.

Mr. Botstein, who wrote to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
in the hope of having the visa problem resolved before the music
festival, said Ms. Ghuman"s case is symptomatic. "This is an example of
the xenophobia, incompetence, stupidity and then bureaucratic
intransigence that we are up against,” he said, also citing the case of
a teacher of Arabic at Bard who missed the first weeks of the spring
semester this year because of visa problems. “What is at stake is
America’s pre-eminence as a place of scholarship."

Ms. Ghuman is
certainly not alone in her frustration. Academic and civil liberties
groups point to other foreign scholars who have been denied entry
without explanation at an airport, or refused a visa when they applied.
A pending lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union
contends that the Bush administration is using heightened security
measures to keep foreign scholars out on ideological grounds in
violation of the First Amendment rights of American scholars to hear
them.

But Ms. Ghuman's case does not seem to fit such a pattern.
Few believe that her book in progress, “India in the English Musical
Imagination, 1890-1940," or her work on Elgar, best known by Americans
for "Pomp and Circumstance," could have raised red flags in Washington.
And if it were a question of security profiling, nothing in her
background fits.

She was born in Wales. Her mother is a British
homemaker, and her father, an emeritus professor of educational
psychology at the University of Wales, was born in India to a Sikh
family and moved to Britain
in the 1960s. Last semester, Ms. Ghuman tried to teach her students by
video link. This academic year, she is on an unpaid leave of absence.

"The
arbitrary and inexplicable exclusion of Dr. Ghuman has been a personal
tragedy for her and a cause of distress to Mills and to American higher
education," said Janet L. Holmgren, the president of Mills College, who
called her “one of our most distinguished faculty members.”

"She
seems to be in this limbo," said Ms. Ghuman’s fiancé, Paul Flight, 47,
who has visited her three times in Britain and is considering a move
there. Mr. Flight, a countertenor, co-directed Darius Milhaud's opera
about Orpheus and Eurydice with Ms. Ghuman at Mills three years ago. [read on...]

Nalini Ghuman, an up-and-coming musicologist and expert on the British
composer Edward Elgar, was stopped at the San Francisco airport in
August last year and, without explanation, told that she was no longer
allowed to enter the United States.

Her case has become a cause célèbre among musicologists and the
subject of a protest campaign by the American Musicological Society and
by academic leaders like Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College
at Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., where Ms. Ghuman was to have participated
last month in the Bard Music Festival, showcasing Elgar’s music.

But
the door has remained closed to Ms. Ghuman, an assistant professor at
Mills College in Oakland, Calif., who is British and who had lived,
studied and worked in this country for 10 years before her abrupt
exclusion.

The mystery of her case shows how difficult, if not
impossible, it is to defend against such a decision once the secretive
government process has been set in motion.

After a year of
letters and inquiries, Ms. Ghuman and her Mills College lawyer have
been unable to find out why her residency visa was suddenly revoked, or
whether she was on some security watch list. Nor does she know whether
her application for a new visa, pending since last October, is being
stymied by the shadow of the same unspecified problem or mistake.

In
a tearful telephone interview from her parents' home in western Wales,
Ms. Ghuman, 34, an Oxford graduate who earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, said she felt like a character in Kafka.

"I don't know why it’s happened, what I'm accused of," she said. "There's no opportunity to defend myself. One is just completely
powerless."

Kelly Klundt, a spokeswoman for Customs and Border Protection in the Department of Homeland Security,
said officers at San Francisco International Airport had no choice but
to bar Ms. Ghuman because the State Department, at its discretion, had
revoked her visa. The State Department would not discuss the case,
citing the confidentiality of individual visa records.

Mr. Botstein, who wrote to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
in the hope of having the visa problem resolved before the music
festival, said Ms. Ghuman"s case is symptomatic. "This is an example of
the xenophobia, incompetence, stupidity and then bureaucratic
intransigence that we are up against,” he said, also citing the case of
a teacher of Arabic at Bard who missed the first weeks of the spring
semester this year because of visa problems. “What is at stake is
America’s pre-eminence as a place of scholarship."

Ms. Ghuman is
certainly not alone in her frustration. Academic and civil liberties
groups point to other foreign scholars who have been denied entry
without explanation at an airport, or refused a visa when they applied.
A pending lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union
contends that the Bush administration is using heightened security
measures to keep foreign scholars out on ideological grounds in
violation of the First Amendment rights of American scholars to hear
them.

But Ms. Ghuman's case does not seem to fit such a pattern.
Few believe that her book in progress, “India in the English Musical
Imagination, 1890-1940," or her work on Elgar, best known by Americans
for "Pomp and Circumstance," could have raised red flags in Washington.
And if it were a question of security profiling, nothing in her
background fits.

She was born in Wales. Her mother is a British
homemaker, and her father, an emeritus professor of educational
psychology at the University of Wales, was born in India to a Sikh
family and moved to Britain
in the 1960s. Last semester, Ms. Ghuman tried to teach her students by
video link. This academic year, she is on an unpaid leave of absence.

"The
arbitrary and inexplicable exclusion of Dr. Ghuman has been a personal
tragedy for her and a cause of distress to Mills and to American higher
education," said Janet L. Holmgren, the president of Mills College, who
called her “one of our most distinguished faculty members.”

"She
seems to be in this limbo," said Ms. Ghuman’s fiancé, Paul Flight, 47,
who has visited her three times in Britain and is considering a move
there. Mr. Flight, a countertenor, co-directed Darius Milhaud's opera
about Orpheus and Eurydice with Ms. Ghuman at Mills three years ago. [read on...]